i want to feed you
Like Life
Christmas: 1972
far from us
in paris
hamburgers and fries
slathered in catsup
crisp bacon and eggs
over easy
catfish caught deep
in the channels of
the mississippi then
baked ziti made from
scratch in my abruzzi
kitchen with garlic i’ve
sliced thin with a
special razor blade
kept by the toaster and
ricotta cheese i bought
from the little italian
guy on the corner of
arthur avenue who’s
been there since fdr
then i’ll feed it to you
by the happy forkful
wiping your hungry
mouth with slices of
toasted garlic bread
and a big pour of chianti
till it ran down the slope
of your white shoulders
and reddened your
nipples
which i’d lick with
my greedy tongue
and if i had you i
would go on feeding
till you sped past 100
and you wouldn’t stop
eating the chocolate and
hazelnut gelato i’d bring
home from the gelateria
della palma by the pantheon
the pistachio
crowning the cone with cool
green flavor oh i’d spoon it
into you careening on
now to the poetry which would
dribble down past our belly buttons
winking up at us
and we’d feel as if we’d
awakened on the last day
of our lives at nathan’s on
coney island there on the
boardwalk and you know what?
if i had you i wouldn’t
share you with anybody.
Like life, the ice palace had no clear purpose but many unclear purposes. Nobody goes
inside except tourists and small children. In the corner lurks a massive snow wedding cake.
Staring impassively at the cake is a life-size bluish Empress Anna, shimmering on her
throne like
some kind of hologram. In the bedroom beside an ice cave is the cataclysmic marriage bed,
its canopy resembling a frozen waterfall. A pair of ice slippers rest on the ice cushion on the
floor. The palace is attended by a tiny old man with a wispy beard who looks as though he has
wandered off the page of a Dr. Seuss book, and a solidly build man of middle years with one arm.
These two preside over an entire museum of natural history On the banks of the Neva,
skeletons weep into handkerchiefs made of brain tissue, with wormy intestines encircling their
legs. Wax injected blood vessels are visible. A child's skeleton uses a bow made Of a dried artery
to play on a violin. Two mouthed sheep stare unhappily at eight-legged lambs and dog-faced
mice. A baby with eyes under its nose and hands under its neck, spotting us, lifts a flipper
hand in greeting. Yes, the ice palace sits melting on the thawing Neva, representing the transitory
nature of human achievements, an ephemeral dollhouse for immature skeletons or a dull
poet who
after three unsuccessful suicides agree to write sonnets for the Empress about
this icy sofa. “I sing the sofa,” he begins, followed by a tiny hiccup of laughter. In six cantos he
recounts again the anxiety of literature in an ice age, beating the Unconscious with a stick; thrown
in jail, the poet finishes his ode and reads it at The frosty wedding wearing an Italian
carnival mask. He will go on to write exactly one hundred books, each boring enough to induce
Seizures. Yet on this masquerade night we see the beginning of The true history of Russian
Literature, which is to say the history of the Destruction of Russian writers. The ice palace lies
smashed on the swollen river. Some children clamor on the remaining ice Boulders, resembling
in their padded snowsuits tiny astronauts. But Elif remembers the palace at night, worthy of transport
to Saturn, taking its place there, ringed with ice and brightly made, as among the stars.
My first girlfriend had blue Christmas lights strung on trees in front of her stone house. My family
had all gone to bed. When midnight came, it was snowing. The streets were silent as I drove.
Snow filled the lumberyards of Peekskill along the Hudson River. I’d gotten a wool sweater, some
gloves, a navy blazer with gold buttons, gray pants. A wet kiss from my father, his holiday tears.
She was in her wooden bed, high on the second floor, beneath the dormer. I parked in her driveway,
cut the engine, listened to it tick. Her house was filled with brilliant surprises, narrow white feet and her girlish sleep. It’d be years before I returned. She’d be a teacher, I’d be married, my grandfather dead, my grandmother still in the kitchen in her worn housedress. The lumberyards along the river would be
empty. She’d hold me all through the night. We’d try to sort the past, but everything had fled, her innocence, small chin, the thinness of her wrists. She’d lay beside me on the couch in her terrible insignificance, the life we never lived dissolved to tears. But that Christmas in her driveway snowflakes
like diamonds stuck to the curved windshield of my father’s Ford. I waited for the sun to rise, like a story.
far from us
for patti smith & robert mapplethorpe
i picture you with a star at your foot
making you cornell boxes with colored
string, paper lace, discarded rosaries and
black pearls, a visual poem written for one
i’d give you an italian vase if I thought it’d
help, but I’ve discarded your spell for prayer
long ago I figured out that you were my twin
but we shuttle back and forth like the ferryman’s
children, across four states of non-being, across
our river of tears, telling our stories like wendy
entertaining the lost children of neverland
and baby, you know what? it’s not us.
one year the men all dressed in sherbet colored
summer suits of purest linen
it was the year i fell in love with a
hand model
who
wore white gloves during
dinner
removing them only to
rummage through her purse or to
place her fork gently beside
a pale green pistachio cake
as if afraid to sink the
tines deeper
though she got deeper into me
and while I am not complaining
exactly
(because how can you not love a woman
named mazarine)
i already appear to have said
too much
as the french reserve a large category
of thought for le non dit
(the unsaid)
which come to think of it might
have made a better title
for this poem
but one hopes not to be found
gauche for observing
that in paris there are
but two ages
youth & decay
and mazarine was youth and i
well
you see
so there she was that
night
with her white gloves and
faint arm hair
and that upward look
that only
young girls have
who so want to please
a girl in translation
Gary Percesepe is Associate Editor at BLIP Magazine (formerly Mississippi Review), and a Contributor at The Nervous Breakdown. His short stories, poems, essays, reviews, and interviews have been widely published or are forthcoming in Story Quarterly, N + 1, Salon, Mississippi Review, Antioch Review, Houston Literary Review, Westchester Review, The Nervous Breakdown, Rumpus, Pank, Bluestem, Bull, Word Riot, Moon Milk Review, Fogged Clarity, Necessary Fiction, Frigg, Twelve Stories, Negative Suck, Pirene’s Fountain, and other places. He is the author of four books in philosophy and an epistolary novel with Susan Tepper, What May Have Been: Letters of Jackson Pollock and Dori G, (Cervana Barva Press). He just completed his second novel, Leaving Telluride, set in Telluride, Colorado.
